Tag: daily photo

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After Thor and I finished with taxes, and with eating the fabulous burgers he cooked, we headed into Manhattan so that I could meet up with my friend Jonathan, who wanted to se my so and also to go se the new Richard Foreman show with me.

I was a little late, but I did arrive at the gallery just in time to help a very nice couple pick which of my drawings they were going to buy. They were trying to decide between three different ones, and I helped them go with the one that was perhaps the most difficult to handle, but which was most important in terms of the development of the work. I know; the more mercenary among you would say that I should have talked them into all three, but I just can’t be that forceful. It’s amazing enough to me that anyone is willing to buy the stuff.

Anyway, being in the gallery is a good way to run into people, I connected with two more former students just while standing there. And I leafed through the guest book.

The Jonathan and I started out for the play, and decided quickly that we were too tired to do it. Instead we sat in a cafe on 10th avenue and caught up on each other’s stories. Then, slice he was parked in the East Village, we walked over to the Strand, where I celebrated not paying taxes and also the prospect of a future check from the gallery by buying Volume one of the new Phaidon History of the photobook, something I’ve been salivating over for a few weeks. After that it was Korean food at Gama, a place on St. Marks that I’ve never eaten at before, but which is fantastic.

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For those of you who may be confused as to what a simper is, actress Drew Barrymore demonstrates the the perfect version from the cover of the current Harper’s Bazaar.

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…and for the first time in my life, my show is basically done: the work is finished except for a couple of minor things, and I just spent the afternoon at the gallery hanging it all. There is something unnerving about that fact.

Things are not completely installed: the gallery will need to use the space for a private showing of something for a client this coming week, so they will document the position of everything, take it down and then I will go back in and do the final hanging, and there are a couple of things at the framer or in transit from other places, but we know where everything is going on the walls and it will be the matter of a couple of hours work to get it all in its final position.

But those of you who have been through this with me before (waltzingtree, girlfagpnw) know that in every other instance I am running around assembling works up until the very last minute. I’ve always used the deadline of a show as the way to bring works to completion. This time, I worked in a completely different way.

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Bye Vampira, I sure hope that Cher paid you royalties.

Look at what one of my students got for me at the punk-rock craft fair: a Jay McCarron photo and an armband doohickey. I feel so glamorous, like I’m in a Saturn Roadster or something.

Last night I was remembering how much I liked the Post Office challenge, and how I wish there was more stuff like that this season. I’m so tired of Tim saying “Gather round designers, I have a surprise for you”. Don’t you get it Bravo? The contestants are supposed to surprise US, you aren’t supposed to constantly surprise THEM to try to generate drama. When you do that, it’s just like having them run an obstacle course. The good thing about Jay was that he was surprising and unpredictable from week to week. This season everyone just stays true to type and tries to duck what ever is thrown at them.

Typing all of that made me feel extra-extra-gay.

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The snow didn’t happen. The rain was minor. Having received advice, I went to CB2 and bought some FLOR. The weather was raw. Now I realize that I don’t even like to walk down Canal Street any more. It’s devolved into a vaguely sinister souk, fueled by peoples desperate need for status. The elderly asian women who offer me dvd’s under their breaths remind me of the Times Square drug dealers of my highschool years, but what they’re trying to sell me is the chance to watch crappy first run movies in the privacy of my own home.

I used to love the way that the low rent knockoff market would generate weird hybrid commodities that just combined the desirable parts of a number of other items into some new monster. Everyone loves Franenstein’s creature. But now the goal is to look like you can afford some piece of Vuitton crap, and to head home with some story of how you braved the wilds of lower Manhattan to get it. It doesn’t matter if you are a smart shopper or a rube, because every one knows that what you’ve bought there is shit anyway. Herds of bovine suckers cluster in the middle of blocks, impossible to get around, while the sharps try to lure them into the warren-like storefronts, with an air of rapacious disdain. All of it is in service to a commodity ideal that has been drained of joy.

A few blocks up Broadway You can buy the “real thing”, from Vuitton, Prada, Kate Spade, etc., now that Soho has been completely converted into a cobbled luxury market. But there’s barely any difference. The notion of a ubiquitous standard of luxury is as odious as one of a ubiquitous standard of entertainment. People in Shanghai and Mumbai are being offered the same handheld video DVDs of Alvin and the Chipmonks as I am. I’m an advocate of dismantling corporate copyright, but even I don’t think that that’s progress.

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Is the storm coming or not? That’s the question the sky is asking. All I know is that it’s mid-day and the boiler is on break between shifts so my feet are cold. It reminds me of living in San Francisco. While I was away this weekend, I hired someone to come in and clean the apartment, so I came home to a shockingly tidy space. I’m embarrassed by how different the floors feel under foot. But I have to buy a new little carpet to put underneath my desk chair so it doesn’t keep rolling away from the keyboard. Anyone have experience with CB2’s carpet tiles?

I’ve noticed that when the cleaning professional encounters my more haphazard work surfaces (my two desks, basically) they have to make a guess about how to tackle it. So today I’m seeing a number of my little containers repurposed in kind of quirky ways that make me hunt around for stuff more. Now I get to audition their solution and see if it works.

Earlier I was playing Liz Phair’s Supernova over and over and singing along. Out in the hall work has resumed on the renovation: thumping, scraping, etc. That’s in contrast to Boss Hog’s Ski Bunny, which is what on the playlist now.

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…to get this reaction from Bear and Jay. It was too short a time to see them, but since I couldn’t handle going out last night, it was a happy circumstance to escort them to their tour date at the tenement museum.

While heading over to meet them I noticed that the LES is once again dotted with galleries, not always to the best effect. If you’re going to put an exhibition space in a storefront like that, why make it into another dull white repressed box? It just makes it look like you’re eager to import the entire Chealsea ethos instead of staking a claim for something new.